End Bicycle Tour

Did I mention that bicycles are wicked scary? After we left the traditional Balinese home it became sort of okay, because we were often on nicely paved, but mostly deserted roads, but we also would come upon roads that were all busted up and bumpy and hilly, so I was often in a constant state of braking and gripping. And fear-sweating. It was exhausting.

But anyway, the scenery was nice, and a few times we stopped to take pictures of things like rice paddies, as evidenced by all the rice paddy photos.

It was a holiday called Galungan, question mark?, in Bali the day of our tour, so there were a bunch of decorations like these hanging around the streets.

I took this picture because it's not pretty.

There were also processions going down a lot of streets, with drumming and such, so sometimes we had to wait for traffic to clear up before we moved on.

My mom mentioned at one point to the tour guide that she really wanted a picture of someone carrying something on her head, because it's so exotic, I guess. So the first chance he got, he asked someone carrying something on her head if we could take her picture. But unluckily, this first person was a crotchety old woman, who didn't even dignify him with a verbal answer, just gave a curt yank of her head to the side and kept walking. The group of young girls below were happy to have their photo taken, though. They were acting like they felt like movie stars, getting stopped in the street. Isn't that special.

The tour included lunch as well as breakfast, so after a couple hours of biking, we stopped at some lunch restaurant, the kind with only three choices for food. Or at least, the menu for those of us on a tour had three choices. But again, nice scenery. The toilet was some raunchy-ass shit, though, I gotta tell ya. I should have brought my camera in there.

Also on the tour we saw a couple abandoned temples. The first one was abandoned apparently because of the big tree outside it. I guess it is considered to give luck to people in marriage or something if you pin something to it, and the tour guide said that eventually so many people came over there just t put stuff on the tree, that there were more people outside the temple than inside. So they packed up and moved elsewhere.

Tree.

Stuff.

Helmet.

Then we saw this place that's meant for VIPs. The tour guide said Obama went there. We did not get to go in there.

Inside this little tower I think there was an old dude playing Solitaire or something. I could be remembering this wrong, though.

The final stop on the tour was this temple, which is the oldest shrine in Bali, triple question mark??? It's been a month just about since this all happened, so the details are now fuzzy. Anyway, it's a big deal for some reason or other.

I'm pretty tired of writing about Bali now. I've done some other things in Japan since then, but I guess I'm a stickler for chronology. I guess next time will be the last Bali entry. Thank glob.